Posts Tagged ‘cost’

Treehugger has a nice piece detailing an innovative and cost-effective way to maximize growing space: build a vertical bottle garden. All you need is a pile of plastic PET bottles, a roll of twine, cutting implements, and some time.

If you were so inclined, you could modify the design to include a drip irrigation system using rubber tubes or some other kind of pipe. This way you would be maximizing both the use of space and the use of water.

Amazing, right? Another fine example of how great solutions to pressing problems are already here, it’s more a matter a spreading the know-how.

This is an obscene amount of U.S. Taxpayer money. Money that could have helped solved the health care issues… money that could have put the U.S. back near the top regarding education levels… money that could have taken a big chunk out of the U.S. foreign debt. This trillion dollars could have been used for pretty much anything other than occupying foreign countries who really have no desire to be occupied.

The U.S. is no safer now. Their economy is teetering on the brink of collapse, their infrastructure is crumbling, and the world holds as much contempt for America as ever.

Of course, if you ask the people involved in the war industry, they will likely say how the cost is justified and how the war efforts have been working and will continue to work: the U.S. is safer, America’s enemies have been crushed, Iraq and Afghanistan are now better off.

But their opinions need to be taken with a huge grain of salt… their livelihood depends on the war-industry. It is their job! It’s how they feed their families. The idea of ending war means they would need to find new employment, and that is a scary prospect to most anyone.

Asking people entrenched in the war industry if the war is working would be the same as asking a drug enforcement agent if the war on drugs is working. The vast majority of them would like to believe their efforts are working.

With billion dollar profits involved and millions of people with an invested stake in perpetuating conflict, war will not stop on its own. It will take a force of equal or greater power to slow down and stop the war-machine.

This force will come from the millions and millions of people around the world who are sick of war – the world’s peace warriors. The more we come together, the more we coordinate our efforts and mobilize to action, the more power we will gain to systematically dismantle the war machine.

The world’s peace movement will continue to grow in strength. We will prevail.